


The City's Still Breathing

by nimblermortal



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Gen, Hell's Kitchen (City), city!verse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-17
Updated: 2015-06-18
Packaged: 2018-04-04 21:27:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,220
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4153566
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nimblermortal/pseuds/nimblermortal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Matt's always been the City, but no one ever told him - everyone already knows where to find New York.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Battlin’ Jack Murdock found the kid on his doorstep and figured it was like any kid. Why wouldn’t it be? This was Hell’s Kitchen; kids turned up orphaned all the time. Because he was the man he was, he took it in and gave it his name and made up an absentee mother for it, and because he was the man he was, it wasn’t long before he was proud of his little Matty and saw little else.

Of course he thought it was like any kid; New York already had a City. Matty knew that too, and so the things he heard were normal. Everyone heard them. Other people were just better at not listening.

For a while, Jack Murdock thought about getting Matty counseling, wondered if the kid might be schizophrenic - but then there was the truck, and the screaming, and he had bigger things to worry about for a long time. So did Matty.

Except that when that went away, when there was nothing to see and no one to worry about, nothing to look out for, it was harder to remember he was not built of steel and stone, and that the thing that rushed into and out of his body with each breath was air and not metal containers and fishing ships and semis full of groceries and toilet paper and piano benches and -

Stick was different. Stick was the first to know. Maybe Stick had seen others like Matty; maybe he was just a blind old man. But he gave Matty something else to think about, some way to frame this tide of sensation that was not _veins made of streets and blood like traffic, heart pumping the bike couriers and food trucks, the subways and the piss-and-old-gasoline scent of motion through my body._ Stick made it bearable, made Matty not just capable, but dangerous. And then he left, too, the moment Matty offered him the worn ice cream wrapper that was half adoption paper and half citizenship record.

(Stick probably knew it would have been a citizenship record if he kept it, a name scribbled into the margins of some overlooked record, and a hundred files pointing directly at him for the rest of his life.)

So Matty went back to the world of books, the mind-world his father had offered to him, his fingers brushing the raised _cracks across the sidewalks, wind blowing trash over the pavement that would never be repaired, carrying with it scents and sounds and_ all the infinite information that a world of Braille could offer. He was good at it; he soaked up information and stored it in his back alleys, in the spaces between bricks where men threw other men and beat them until they bled, the heat and sweat and fear becoming the ink that wrote them across Matty’s brain, half-remembered fonts from a time when he could see.

If the City was blind, what could its governors know about what went on inside it?

How could they know about the boy who could have gone to university anywhere because he was so good at memorizing? He went outside  his neighborhood for the first time - though surely he had done that before, surely… when? He had never realized what it was to be truly blind . There were no familiar streets here; he did not instinctively know the lay of the land, he stubbed his toe for the first time and felt a tide of indignation and betrayal at these silent stones. He did not know how far it was from building to building, he did not know which way to turn to find the stairs; he found himself groping, truly fumbling, searching for the button to the elevator. He could not understand why the world was so empty, and so full of traps.

He asked receptionists for help and they took his arm, and for the first time he was truly leaning on them, and they asked how long he had been blind, and he lied because they would never believe he had been blind since he was a child, not the way he staggered. Their voices were flat and empty of emotion, of information; when he spoke to them, he could not hear the faintest echo of a taxi’s horn.

“Is this room 312?” he asked, and had no way of knowing, no sense of the building’s inherent self, its smugness at knowing its own layout, its amused tolerance of the way its people labeled its limbs.

“Yeah, who’re you looking for?” said a voice that tasted, in the bleak blank emptiness of this new world, of honey. And in that second, Matt’s world opened into a sudden shocking duplicity: he could hear one heartbeat where he had heard hundreds of thousands. He could taste one voice. Foggy? Foggy was the only thing that made his world clear. When Foggy said he was _just a guy, right, a really, really good-looking guy,_ Matt’s tongue was already wrapped around his and filling every space between his teeth. And Foggy would never know.

He learned to maneuver at university, to be truly blind, to sense with only one extra pair of eyes, a single illuminating presence nearby whispering _Hell’s Kitchen… Hell’s Kitchen… home._ He learned to focus, to drain away everything but one presence. He learned to memorize things with his own brain, that fragile, isolated creature squatting in his head that was all squish and fluid and nothing like the electricity lines and water pipes and cable cords that ought to stretch beneath his streets. He was Matt Murdock at university, and he would have died without Foggy.

When they returned, the Kitchen had learned to live without him. It hid things from him now, as if he were only one of its citizens, and Matt beat against it, his senses like wings encaged by steel and cement, no longer flowing freely. It let him in piece by piece, giving him information - _apartment here, office here, avenge this, get thrown in that dumpster_ \- grudgingly and only when necessary. It hid the most important things from him as it hid from its own politicians. It hid his self from him.

“I have dreams for this city,” Wilson Fisk said, over and over, and he did not know, the people did not know, the city did not know, _Matt_ did not know that the city was no longer just a borough; the City had been created, had been dreamed of, had dreamed of itself.

_You told me you were the man this city needs._

_Maybe the city created you._


	2. Chapter 2

There were those who guessed. James Wesley was the first. He looked at this little borough, so separate from the rest of the city, so… _select_ , and felt the way the stones shifted under his feet, not because he loved this place but because he noticed things, and he liked them to be in order, and Hell’s Kitchen was not in order. He knew something was missing, and he knew he would find it, and he did, in a boy’s gruff voice and reaching dreams, a politician who had nothing to live for but this city. He promised he would wrest this city for itself, and he promised himself never to mention such a sorrow to the City.

Wilson Fisk was the second, because he guessed what Wesley was hiding. Wesley wanted him to know he knew; he left clues in the way he arranged the little details of Fisk’s life. Fisk was not unclever; he saw very quickly that Hell’s Kitchen had a City, and that Wesley was determined he would find it. Fisk wanted to do better. He wanted to make the Kitchen so pure, so clean and beautiful, that its body would be flawless and untouchable, as pristine as a stretch of blank white canvas. He found it. She was everything he had dreamed she would be.

Vanessa was the third, because she had never met someone so clear of purpose as Fisk, so determined to purge every drop of illness from his veins. She knew from the power she sensed in him, the madness of crime that ran through his streets - but she could draw him back out of that madness, set him free to change it. They would fix it. Together.

In the back alleys, the City gasped with pain and begged an off-duty nurse to sew him up and say nothing. She spoke to him of broken bones, cracked ribs, and endless stitches. He said nothing back to her. They’d knit. They always did. They’d heal flawlessly, the way every wound did, melting back into smooth flesh the way he melted into his own shadows. The way everything healed before the Russians, the explosions, the three round bullet wounds that seared across his flesh and burned like nothing ever had before. The grate that almost didn’t open for him, for itself. The scars that healed only over weeks and ached for longer. That left permanent scars on his skin, scars he could feel with the same pads he read Braille with.

_If I keep going this way, my body will be riddled with these,_ he thought, and did not distinguish between the skin beneath his fingers and the rubble above his foundations. _I wonder if I will ever learn to read them?_


	3. Endorsement from the Highest Court

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> QuarticMoose pointed out that they graduated from Columbia. Not out-of-City, which I had assumed. At which point I started wondering if New York does graduation speeches and... there y'are.

The general consensus was that New York came to graduation drunk. Later years would listen to the story with envy, or sit in the sweltering sun longing for such an entertaining story, but after Matt and Foggy’s year, her handlers must have kept a closer eye on her, because the episode was never repeated.

“This is a graduation speech,” she announced. “I’m supposed to tell you how clever you are for graduating from such an excellent school, how you can change the world. Well, listen up - I don’t love a damn one of you any more than I love the tramp kicking nails into my gutter, the homeless children you kick into my streets, or the illiterate window washer forty floors up my third highest skyscraper. I could let her fall and still be a city of eight million people, and I don’t give a rat’s ass more about the rest of you. You’ll all go on and do whatever the fuck it is you trained here to do, and most of you will make a mess of it and you still won’t change anything enough for me to notice you. There’s only one person here who makes giving this speech worthwhile, who I’ve come to tell -“

She leaned forward and every citizen of that City leaned closer to her as well, craning their ears to catch those precious words meant just for them.

“I despise you,” New York breathed. “There is nothing you can take from me that will diminish my grandeur.”

She leaned back, releasing the room, and a thousand new graduates blinked for what felt like the first time.

“So go ahead. Prove me wrong. I’ll be waiting. And _you_ ,” New York added, flinging out a hand, “see me after class.”

There was a silence, and then an enormous, deep, collective nervous laugh. New York’s smile could have broken anyone else’s in half. She held herself like a conqueror as she crossed the stage in too-high heels, and there was not a trace of the affable socialite everyone had heard about in her gestures. In the area around Foggy Nelson, people quietly shuffled a few steps to one side or the other, no longer certain they wanted the honor of being the one New York singled out to talk to.

“What’s going on?” Matt Murdock asked.

“She pointed to the area around us,” Foggy said, automatically translating the gestures. “I think she wants to talk to me.”

Matt’s face split into a grin before he turned to conscientiously face Foggy. “That’s great. That’s _wonderful._ What are you doing here? Go meet the City!”

“I’m a little ner -“

“Come on. Do it for Nelson and Murdock. Who wouldn’t want to hire the lawyer New York City singled out at graduation?” Matt asked, and nudged Foggy toward the stage with his cane. “I’ll be fine. Go on!”

Foggy went. His audience lasted less than thirty seconds, long enough to see the mess New York had made of the top-floor hotel room she had occupied, just long enough for her to declare that he was not the one she wanted to see and tell him to get out.

“I don’t understand, man,” Foggy said. “New York’s - everybody says she’s easy to get along with. Personable. Happy to talk about anything with anybody.”

“You want my advice?” Matt asked. “Don’t tell anybody else what happened. Make up something better.”

“She might be angry at me already,” Foggy said.

“You got all the way back here without getting lost or injured. I think she’s fine,” said Matt. “Go write an endorsement of Nelson and Murdock from the City that houses us.”

Foggy did, with trepidation, and it hung in small, proud print over their logo at the top of their website. It didn’t seem to do them any harm, or any good either. Any more than there was ever a sign of hate or favor from the city streets.

Not by daylight.


End file.
